Perspectives on Epic

189 Pages·1965·3.101 MB·English

by  Frederick H. Candelaria, William C. Strange

PERSPECTIVES O N EPIC
edited by Frederick H. Candelaria
AND William C. Strange Both, University of Oregon
ALLYN AND BACON, INC. • BOSTON, 1965
ALLYN AND BACON CASEBOOK SERIES
GENERAL EDITOR • LEONARD F. DEAN
© Copyright 1965 by Allyn and Bacon, Inc.
150 Tremont Street, Boston. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form,
by mimeograph, or any other means, without permission
writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-18895
Printed in the United States of America
PREFACE
P
erhaps no anthology like this one has been attempted before because
the epic is indeed a vast subject and the approaches to it varied. But
the appeal, too, is vast and varied.
No other genre has the scope of epic, if we define epic and the epic
spirit (as E. M. W. Tillyard does) to include certain novels and dramas
such as War and Peace and Shakespeare’s history plays. Even more
strictly defined, the epic is the genre of the heroic age, and so succeeds
better than any other form in evoking (and perhaps provoking) the
heroic spirit in our unheroic age. There is also the appeal of literary
problems posed by the many changes epic has undergone.
What is involved in the transformation of the oral (primary) epic
into the literary (secondary) epic; of the heroic poem into the romance;
of serious epics into mock epics; of the epic poem into the epic novel?
Are works so diverse as The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, and The
Wasteland; The Rape of the Lock, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones,
The Prelude, and War and Peace; and Shakespeare’s histories—all
epics? Why was the epic so highly regarded in the Renaissance, an age
so rich in other literary forms? Usually, epics are thought of as long
poems, but is (as Poe asked) a long poem really possible? Is epic
possible today?
The essays, chronologically arranged to correspond with the evolu­
tion of epic over the ages (historical and literary “periods”), and the
exhibits, arranged to illustrate formal and other aspects of epic, are,
respectively, secondary and primary materials that should be used
with any of the several epics readily available in paperback books. The
essays and exhibits will illuminate historical and critical questions that
are raised in studying epics and other forms in introductory “types”
courses, English literature survey courses, world literature panoramas,
and advanced genre studies. The exhibits that comprise the second
part of the book are primary materials especially useful for controlled
research topics in teaching the research paper in freshman composition
courses.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help and encouragement we
received in preparing this book from Professor Leonard F. Dean, our
general editor, the editoral staff of Allyn and Bacon, and especially
Marilyn Triplett for her secretarial assistance.
Frederick Candelaria
William C. Strange

CONTENTS
PART ONE: ESSAYS 1
Literature Without Letters-Rhys Carpenter 3
Homer-C. M. Bowra 10
Enter the Romantic Roman: Virgil-Edith Hamilton 23
Heroic Song: Siegried-Jan de Vries 32
The Dark Ages: Beowulf ■ Gilbert Highet 41
Dante-E. M. W. Ti llyard; Samuel Taylor Coleridge 51
The Romance Epic -Graham Hough 54
Renaissance Ideas-Joel E. Spingarn 62
Milton •Arnold Stein 73
Dryden- William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks 84
Epic, Comedy, and Prose-Henry Fielding 87
Wordsworth: The Personal Epic-Karl Kroeber 93
The Possibility of a Long Poem-Herbert Lindenberger 103
Theory of Genres -Northrop Frye 114
Epical Actions-Paul Goodman 121
On Translating Homer Once More-Kenneth G. Wilson 130
The Orphic Voice-Elizabeth Sewell 140
PART TWO: EXHIBITS 143
I. The Conventions of Epic
Definitions
1. M. H. Abrams 145
2. Lord Byron, from Don Juan 148
Simile 149
1. Homer, from The Iliad, as translated by Chapman 149
2. Virgil, from The Aeneid, as translated by Wordsworth 149
3. Virgil, from The Aeneid, as translated by Dryden 150
4. Milton, from Paradise Lost 151
vii
Invocation 152
1. Homer, from The Odyssey, as translated by Pope 152
2. Milton, from Paradise Lost 152
3. Wordsworth, from The Prelude 153
Catalogue 154
1. Milton, from Paradise Regained 154
2. Wordsworth, from The Prelude 156
3. David Jones, “Redriff,” from The Anathemata 158
II. The Heroic Ideal
1. Homer, from The Odyssey, as translated by Rieu 162
2. Proclus, from Chrestomathy, as translated by Evelyn-White 163
3. Dante, from Hell, as translated by Cary 163
4. Tennyson, “Ulysses” 166
5. Ezra Pound, from The Cantos 168
6. Robert Graves, “Ulysses” 168
•III. A Difficult Age for Epic
1. Chaucer, from “The Squire’s Tale” 170
2. Malory, from “The Knight of the Cart” 171
3. Milton, from Paradise Lost 172
4. Wordsworth, “London, 1802” 173
5. Peacock, from “The Four Ages of Poetry” 174
6. David Jones, “Preface,” from The Anathemata 176
Readings and Topics
Antiquity 181
The Middle Ages 181
The Renaissance 182
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 182
Today 183
PART ONE
ESSAYS

LITERATURE W ITHOUT LETTERS*
Rhys Carpenter
The study of literature is an enterprise so vast that no one human
mind can cope with it successfully. The multiplicity of languages, the
centuries of time, are too formidable. Books and manuscripts, printed
or written, recent, medieval, and ancient, make a total too great for a
single lifetime’s reading. And yet this terrifying array, stretching from
the pyramid texts of Egypt down to the novels of our own day, derives
from only a fraction of the years and a portion of the lands in which
human literary activity has flourished—if we will admit the etymological
contradiction that literature may exist without letters.
The craft of printing is only five hundred years old; European
knowledge of paper dates back only a thousand years; the very art of
writing has been known to most European peoples for less than two
thousand years and nowhere, not even in China or Egypt or Mesopo­
tamia, seems to be appreciably older than five thousand. A respectable
antiquity, this last one! But how much older still are poetry and song
and the craft of telling enthralling stories to attentive ears? Without
benefit of writing, songs may be composed, sung, remembered, and sung
again; adventures may be told, incidents, anecdotes, and marvelous
happenings recounted; even poetry of great range and power and beauty
may come into being and persist, nor die with the passing of its maker.
Beside and beyond the known realm of written literature stretches
interminably the almost unknown world of oral literature, whose merest
fraction has been reduced to written or printed form.
Speech must be almost as old as humankind; song must be almost
as old as speech; and poetry almost as old as song. Against this enor­
mous vista, writing, on which our literary types depend, is almost a
modernism. It is idle to ask how old is language, since no one, seemingly,
yet knows securely the age of sentient loquent man; wherefore it is
impossible to venture even a .plausible guess at the antiquity of oral
* Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962], originally
published as Vol. XX of the Sather Classical Lectures. Reprinted by per­
mission.
3
4 • PERSPECTIVES ON EPIC
literary forms. Yet is is fairly safe to say that, with the antiquity of
writing nowhere transcending five thousand years, the literature of
unwritten speech must outdate its written competitor and successor
by many times its measure. Attic tragedy and history, Plato and the
pre-Socratics, will then become milestones set only a little distance
back along the road which leads to the shadowy unwritten beginnings
of literature. What seems a giant stride back into the past from Ibsen
to Aeschylos is but a step that could be repeated many times before we
should come to man’s primal discovery of the magic of assonances and
cadences, when he began to use speech for something more than the
mere grunted communication of his immediate want. But these other
steps behind Aeschylos are steps into darkness where it is difficult to
catch even a glimmer of a lost world.
Yet we are not, like the paleontologists, seeking for things utterly
extinct. Out of this immeasurable past, oral literature still survives
today, both in its own right in its own true oral forms as well as in
written record of itself, preserved before it died out in the past. But
it has suffered and diminished greatly, and in many lands where once
it flourished it is all but extinct today, because literacy, the spreading
use of writing, everywhere sooner or later destroys it.
Perhaps you remember the scene in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame
where a cleric makes the rather cryptic remark that the printed book will
ultimately destroy the carven edifice of the cathedral wherein architec­
ture and its attendant arts in the past had set the visual record of man’s
thoughts. “The book will kill the building,” he insists; “this will kill
that—ceci tuera cela!”
So it has been with the impact of writing on oral literature: “ceci
tuera cela!” And human memory, which once perforce kept all human
records, relinquished its powers to the newcomer and grew proportion­
ately enfeebled with this cession of her strength. Most of us today can
hardly credit the achievement of the illiterati who knew the Koran by
heart or carried the entire Iliad and Odyssey in their minds. But nowa­
days whoever trusts his library and notebooks may no longer trust his
remembrance. Only where memory cannot be displaced, as in the
concert recitals of musicians or the operatic roles of singers, can we still
observe its prodigious powers. But originally Mnemosyne was mother
of all the Muses.
In the world of today, where the spread of literacy has remorselessly
been destroying the oral literary forms and only the lowest cultural
levels preserve their preliterate traditions, oral literature has had to take
refuge with the peasant and with backward cultures. But there the
strata which have escaped schooling will continue to foster it, and in
all levels the children still too young to have acquired letters will be its
eager audience. But the mature, the intelligent, the gifted of mankind
will despise and neglect it and let it die. For this reason it has been